Alex Garland's Civil War is a Must See

Movie review

Sunday, I took a break from the ongoing disaster cleanup in my basement and went to the Eastgate Cinema in Mayfield Heights, Ohio, where for $18.75 I could get a senior ticket, a hot dog with fixins, a Stella Artois, and a reclining bucket seat to see Alex Garland’s Civil War.

Some movies, like the Lord of the Rings, Star Trek and Star Wars franchises, really need to be seen on the big screen to get the full impact. Fortunately for all you streamers out there, that isn’t necessary for this film. Still, it’s less than 2 hours long, so I didn’t even have to haul my 65 year old self up for a restroom break.

I cannot possibly give a thorough review of this film, and my own reaction to it, without throwing in a few spoilers. If you’re worried about that, stop reading now. If not, I promise not to give away the ending, but I have to give away something of the plot.

The movie is set in the final weeks of a Second American Civil War. The unnamed President, played in a few cameo appearances by Nick Offerman mainly bragging about imaginary victories and demanding the unconditional surrender of the secessionists, has succeeded in destroying the FBI, and has ignored the 22nd Amendment to be somehow elected to a third term.

Most Western and Southern States had a problem with this and seceded, taking the military forces stationed there with them. Since those states include California, Texas, and most of the West and South, that’s most of the military, and it shows. In the film, everybody but the loyalists are referred to as Western Forces or WF.

That map is similar to an 1861 map in that by 1865 it looked a LOT different. In the movie, three experienced journalists and one newbie travel in an SUV from New York to Washington DC, and the front stretches from Philadelphia to northern Virginia. It’s obvious which side is winning.

It is not obvious at all what principles or ideologies are being fought over, however, which drove some reviewers, especially liberals, nuts. Alex Garland wrote and directed the movie, and his message is brutally clear—civil wars bring out the very worst in people, and are as confusing and disorienting as any activity ever undertaken by humankind.

Our photojournalists, armed with Nikons instead of cellphones, go west through checkpoints manned by soldiers(whose soldiers isn’t clear), and by locals defending their small towns by any means necessary to go near Pittsburgh and through West Virginia to get around the fighting near Philadelphia and hook up with the Western Forces in Charlottesville for their final push into DC.

There are atrocities, including a mass grave supervised by some sort of nationalistic soldier scarily played by Jesse Plemons.

Damn. He looks sort of like me. He even sounds like me. But I’d never be caught dead with red sunglasses. Talk about making sure you see red!

One theme that pervades the movie is that the President had done some Very Bad Things, like massacring his own citizens. This has clearly created a vicious backlash. As the journalists, played convincingly by Kirsten Dunst, Wagner Moura, Cailee Spaeny, and Stephen McKinley Henderson(who is particularly superb) wind their way through a country full of wrecked cars with gunfire and smoke omnipresent in the distance, they encounter a variety of people handling the war in different ways.

Some just try to stay out of it. Some are organized into community defense groups, as the old law and order has broken down. Looters are tortured and hanged in one place, well-armed civilians fight and then execute soldiers in another.

For the first hour and a half of the movie, it is never clear just who the different, scattered soldiers are fighting for. Maybe they were renegade Western Forces rebels, maybe they were government. By the end, I was convinced they were mostly government soldiers, since the Western Forces regular troops are completely different in character.

These guys are organized, professional, and even go out of their way to protect our photojournalists in the final battle in DC, whereas it was known that the President’s loyalists had a tendency to shoot them on sight. In short, they come across as veteran troops. One of their units is the 1st Air Cavalry Brigade, which is stationed in Fort Hood, Texas, so that works.

The only troops in the world right now with that level of experience and professionalism are in Russia.

The movie doesn’t say for how long the war has been raging, but by the time of the events in the film, it’s clearly been awhile, and the rebel WF troops are determined to end it right fucking now.

This movie was very real, dear readers, very human. This is very likely how the next American Revolution will happen, with most of the Army turning on the federal government. With neighbor against neighbor, brother against brother. Civil wars are ugly, and when one side sees a chance to end it, they tend to go all-out.

The directing and acting are both solid. Garland doesn’t give any identity politics stereotypes a chance(probably another reason some liberals hate it). There are different ethnicities and both genders on both sides. There is even a scene where a young man and woman are helpless before a clearly psychopathic soldier and another man risks his own life to rescue her and her friend, something wokeism would never allow.

I guess that in a civil war, ain’t nobody got time for that shit, so Garland wisely left it out. There is one scene where people are shot for their ethnicity, but it’s done by a very convincing psychopath, and is just something else terrible that happens, nothing special in the context of a chaotic civil war.

Finally, this movie is new. It’s an original artistic creation, and not just another bloodydamned remake of anything. I would recommend it for this refreshing reason alone. It has good directing, solid acting performances, realistic special effects, a solid moral message that civil wars are the worst. The ending is plausible, and I found it quite satisfying.

I strongly recommend seeing this film.

Thank you for reading, and I hope you get a chance to see this movie.

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